Or something worse?
“Odd,” Leebo muttered. His optics momentarily defocused, which Dash knew, was the droid equivalent of deep thought.
Dash was temporarily distracted by a ping! from the aft sensor.
Kravengash was coming up fast from behind.
“Captain Rendar, we have a problem,” Leebo said.
“I know. The gate crew is gone and the Wookiee’s on our tail again.”
“Those are the least of our problems.” The droid pointed at a holoschematic of the star system. “The secondary star in this system is a white dwarf.”
“So?”
“My sensors show it’s accreted enough degenerate matter from the primary to put it near critical mass.”
Dash stared at the forward screen, which showed an awe-inspiring view of the binary system. A list of alphanumerics curtained down the screen. “How near? Millennia? Centuries? Years?”
“Closer to eleven-”
Dash felt a rush of relief. “Eleven years? That’s not so-”
“-minutes.”
Dash was speechless. Eleven minutes until the star went supernova, producing, for a few moments, more energy than the rest of the hundred billion stars in the galaxy combined? They couldn’t outrun that! No wonder the gate crew wasn’t around. This operation was about to get shut down for a long, long time….
“You said nothing about this! All you said was there was a jumpgate near a binary system!”
“And I was right.”
“Yeah,” Dash said, seething. “Kudos. You might’ve mentioned the star that in-” he glanced this chrono “-nine minutes will reduce this ship and us to clouds of quarks’”.
“Well, how was I to know? A star exists for billions of years - the odds were literally astronomical that-”
“Enough. We have to get through the gate,” Eaden said. “And we can’t do that with Kravengash blocking our route. They’ll nail us when we decelerate for transition.”
Dash was thinking fast and furiously. “Maybe he doesn’t know. If we tell him, then maybe we can both get of-”
“Oh, he knows,” Eaden said. “No doubt he’s been told he can look forward to a lingering and painful demise’ if he fails to recover the datastick. So for him; it’s a choice between protracted torture, or annihilation so swift he’ll never feel a thing.
“Doesn’t help us,” Dash said. “In four minutes we’re all gonna be gamma rays.”
“I’ll distract them,” Leebo said.
Dash blinked. “How?”
“Take a life pod and harass ‘em. Are the pods armed?”
“Yes, but-”
“You can make the gate transit while I keep the Wookiee occupied. After a few more minutes, he won’t be around to follow.”
“Neither will you,” Eaden pointed out.
Leebo’s servos whined as he shrugged. “You’ve shown me more kindness in a few hours than my previous owners ever did. I owe you.”
* * *
When the Wookiee came in for the kill, Leebo’s escape pod zipped in from above and started firing. The blasters on the pod weren’t much, but they were enough that Kravengash had to deal with them.
Dash watched the viewport. “So, long, Leebo,” he murmured.
He looked at the datastick in his hand. Considered keeping it…. for about three seconds. He ejected it into space. Good luck on finding thatafter the star blew up.
Dash aimed the Outrider at the gate and Eaden triggered the entrance code. Dash hoped it still worked - otherwise they were going to be caught on the wrong side of the gate in the deadly sphere of a supernova.
With a minute and ten seconds to go, he triggered the thrusters….
….and felt the familiar jolt of the energy transfer as the gate lobbed them into another part of the galaxy.
“Too bad about the droid, ” Eaden said when they were safely on the other end of the jump. “I was beginning to…that’s peculiar.”
“What?” Dash followed Eaden’s gaze to the viewport.
The gate was dilating again.
No. Not the Wookiee.
There was a flash of light and the life pod shot through.
No way. Dash activated the comm. “Leebo?”
The droid’s face appeared in the heads-up display that overlaid the forward viewport. “You were expecting someone else?”
“How-?”
“Beats me. I was between the ship and the gate, battling nobly for your lives-”
“Yes,” Eaden said. “And was the cruiser by any chance eclipsing the star system when the star went nova?”
“Maybe….”
“Ah,” Eaden said. “The supernova energy interacted with the hypermatter in both ships’ drives to create a protective local space-time hyper-fold. It only required that the cruiser’s bulk shield the pod for a fraction of a second.”
Dash stared at him as if he’d grown a second head.
Eaden shrugged. “Elementary hyper-physics - to a droid with the proper programming.”
Dash regarded Leebo wryly. “So you knew about that stunt all along. And you had me believing you were gonna sacrifice yourself.”
“I’m insulted,” Leebo said. “I take on this dangerous mission-loyally, selflessly, with no thought for my own safety….”
“Banthaflop.” Dash grinned. “Come aboard. And welcome to the crew, Tin Man….”
Who is Dash Rendar?
A smuggler and freelancer, the Corellian born Dash Rendar and his droid, Leebo, first appeares in the multimedia project Shadows of the Empire in 1996.
From Star Wars Insider 128 (10-11-2011)
11.6.18.15.14.5-1
Star Wars - And Leebo Makes Three Page 2
